Who defines your boundaries?

I had no idea how hard it was going to be to tell my parents what I wanted to do when I grew up. I think what scared them the most, was knowing how stubborn I am. I didn’t understand why it was so hard for them to encourage me to pursue my passion. I mean, they saw me working the crowds at Rosa’s, stressed and still smiling, why didn’t they see what Songe and Luigi saw “I hate to say this Colette, because I don’t wish running a business on my worst enemy, but you can do this, you have what it takes”…come to find out, it was the risk of failure my parents worried about. “Colette, we just don’t want to see you fail, we don’t want you to have to struggle through life. Coffee shops and restaurants are too risky, they don’t always work out, besides were not business owning kinda people. Become a teacher, work for the state, those are jobs secure.” I didn’t want to see me fail either, sure I could do the “secure” job thing, and I’d be happy, but never passionate about doing them. We only get to live once right? I graduated from Redwood High School on June 6, 2001. It had been exactly 20 years sense my parents wedding, and 20 years sense my uncle Robert came to visit us in the Valley (its dang hot here I totally understand). Now my uncle Robert is a very intelligent man, and someone I respect, and on this particular day he asked me a very common question… “Colette, what do you want to do when you grow up?” he sat there in the living room, I am sure ready to hear what most kids say as they are heading off to college and into the big unknown world of freedom and discovery, but I didn’t give them the ‘ol “I don’t know.” I told him what I was going to do. “I’m going to run a coffee shop.” Now my family is known for their laugh, in fact my grandmother once told me that’s how she met my grandfather, she heard his deep, loud, belly shakin’, head thrown back, laugh from across the room…but any way that’s beside the point. So my uncle Robert, with his fathers laugh, nearly busted a gut until he saw I was serious. Then he asked me a very valuable question, he said, “Really…what’s your niche?” What the heck was a niche? “You know, what sets you apart from all the rest?” My answer was simple, yet didn’t make much sense “God.”